Many corporations send payment instructions to their banks to debit an account for paying beneficiaries that can be located across the world and using different currencies. Some corporations may write checks and mail those checks to the beneficiaries. Other corporations may send payment instructions using online banking systems. Some large corporations will generate a file with multiple payments (sometimes hundreds) for beneficiaries that may be in multiple countries and may receive payment in multiple currencies.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can connect the corporation's operations to a bank to assist with the management of internal and external resources. For example, the ERP software can be used to track the ordering of a material, receipt of an invoice, and payment of that invoice. In operation, the corporation's computers provide information to the banks computers regarding payment of these invoices. The banks require specific formats, fields, and impose constraints on those fields for the payment information. When submitting a request for payment to many beneficiaries across the world, the payment information requirements become very complex, involving different formats and different fields.
In order to simplify the complexity of these payments, the ERP software can be reprogrammed, which is very time consuming and expensive. There are some industry standards for formats that can be used by all banks But if a corporation uses more than one bank, the format is likely different for each bank. So the formatting of the payment instructions can be very tedious for a corporation. Also, extracting the data for individual payment instructions for each bank often requires significant investment, time, and effort. In some instances, a corporation may spend three to four months to generate a payment instruction file.
Conventional solutions by banks attempt to facilitate integration with these corporations, but all of the conventional solutions require software to be installed at the corporations' computers. Even solutions by ERP vendors (e.g., SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft) require extensive consultancy resources to complete the installation of software or toolkit solutions. Sierra Atlantic's BankOn attempts to resolve these issues by providing a bank-agnostic approach towards integrating clients with their banks A cloud server receives the standard payment data sent by a corporation's ERP system and enriches it for individual bank processing. BankOn also delivers the file to the corporation's bank.